Peck's Compendium of Fun eBook

He was called to one house and found a girl who seemed
feverish. She was sitting up in a chair, dressed
nicely, but he saw at once that the fatal flush was
on her cheek, and her eyes looked peculiar. He
felt of her pulse, and it was beating at the rate
of two hundred a minute. He asked her to run
out her tongue, and she run out eight or nine inches
of the lower end of it. It was covered with a
black coating, and he shook his head and looked sad.
She had never been married any before, and supposed
that it was necessary for a Justice who was going to
marry a couple to know all about their physical condition,
so she kept quiet and answered questions.

She did not tell him that she had been eating huckleberry
pie, so he laid the coating on her tongue to some
disease that was undermining her constitution.
He put his ear on her chest and listened to the beating
of her heart, and shook his head again. He asked
her if she had been exposed to any contagious disease.
She didn’t know what a contagious disease was,
but on the hypothesis that he had reference to sparking,
she blushed and said she had, but only two evenings,
because John had only just got back from the woods
where he had been chopping, and she had to sit up with
him.

The doctor got out his pill bags and made some quinine
powders, and gave her some medicine in two tumblers,
to be taken alternately, and told her to soak her
feet and go to bed, and put a hot mustard plaster on
her chest, and some onions around her neck.

She was mad, and flared right up, and said she wasn’t
very well posted, and lived in the country, but if
she knew her own heart she would not play such a trick
as that on a new husband.

The doctor got mad, and asked her if she thought he
didn’t understand his business; and he was about
to go and let her die, when the bridegroom came in
and told him to go ahead with the marrying. The
doc. said that altered the case. He said next
time he came he should know what to bring, and then
she blushed, and told him he was an old fool anyway,
but he pronounced them man and wife, and said the
prescription would be five dollars, the same as though
there had been somebody sick.

But the doc. had cheek. Just as he was leaving
he asked the bridegroom if he didn’t want to
ride up to Ashland with him, it was only eighteen miles,
and the ride would be lonesome, but the bride said
not if the court knew herself, and the bridegroom
said now he was there he guessed he would stay.
He said he didn’t care much about going to Ashland
anyway.

COMFORTING COMPENSATIONS.

If a farmer’s wheat is killed by rain, he is
consoled by the fact that rain is just what his corn
needs. If his cattle die of disease, his consolation
lies in the hope that pork will bring a good price.
If boys steal his watermelons, he knows by experience
that they will have the cholera morbus. So everything
that is unpleasant has its compensation.